An Intro Video to Retaining Users with Website Stickiness

When a user leaves your website, you ultimately want them to return again in the future, because with each re-visit, the likelihood of a conversion always increases. To achieve this “stickiness factor”, where users are returning to your site and presenting you with the opportunity to convert them into a paying customer, make it as easy as possible for them to consume your content. You want to be able to present your users with solutions for their needs before they even realize what their needs are so that they can see that your business understands them as individuals.

Understand your target audience

The first and most important thing you can do when you’re trying to make your website have a stickiness factor for visitors is to make sure that you have identified the correct target audience. Understanding your audience, who they are as individuals, what their interests are, and what they are looking for from your online business is crucial. Before you can employ any of the tactics below to engage your users repeatedly online, you need to know how to tailor your marketing to fit their needs. You could have excellent content, great emails, and intriguing advertisements, but if they aren’t shaped specifically for the correct audience, you won’t effectively reach them. You should be tailoring elements of your website to reflect the preferences and interests of your target audience.

It's all about stickiness...

If you’re looking to learn more about stickiness and how to keep visitors coming back, take a look at this clip from Blue Fountain Media’s presentation at the annual Granite Transformations Convention in New Orleans:

Use new and creative content

Constantly creating new content for your website is one of the best ways to keep users coming back, and helps lead them to a conversion. By providing users with valuable information, they’ll be more likely to continue visiting your site because they know that they can learn something with each visit. If a user keeps returning to your site, and each time is finding something new that helps their business, they’re going to keep coming back. If they continue to get value from your content, they will want to invest their time and money in your products or services because they have seen firsthand that you have the foundation to help fulfill their needs.

The content you provide your users with is typically the first impression that they will have of your brand. As a result, you need that content to foster a positive reaction from users from the very beginning. If the user doesn’t have a good experience when they are first on your site, perhaps because don’t think you will provide any substantial value to them, they aren’t going visit again. If the initial experience isn’t positive, any of your efforts that follow up are insignificant. Your content needs to provide an experience that instills trust in your brand, even if it doesn’t immediately lead to a conversion.

Create a personalized experience

Personalization is a key contributor to generating sales with your target audience, and is a strong way to build a connection between all of your marketing tactics and strategies. Email is the first platform to think about when it comes to stickiness. Once you have users signed up you have access to them offsite, and hopefully the ability to bring them back onsite. Take a look at what users are signing up for on your website and what kind of messages they’ll feasibly want to receive from you. Hone in on those individuals, and focus on sending them content that is directly related to the overarching reason they signed up for your newsletters. Steer away from general content, because it will produce far less conversions than content that is geared specifically towards what the user wants to receive. Since the user has already expressed interest in your business, you already have a platform to build on, and don’t need to re-convince them that your brand can help them—you just need to make the relationship stronger, or at the very least, maintain it, until they feel comfortable converting with you.

If email isn’t enough for you, you can also work to personalize your website to help increase stickiness. When returning users visit, you can use cookies to customize parts of your site to reflect their particular behavior based on how they have used your site in the past. Sections that may have interested them the most during their last visit can become more prominent or focused on individual pages.

To highlight this concept, consider this example: Perhaps you’re an online jewelry retailer, and the homepage of your website always features a few top-selling products. A few days ago, one of your users looked at a certain ring. By customizing your homepage to show an image of that ring, or another piece of jewelry from that collection instead of the top-selling products, your users are going to be more likely to convert because they are seeing the product that had already peaked their interest. Similarly, you can personalize your pricing or offer certain deals for repeat users that you want to convert. Customizing your online experience across all mediums, not just your website, is always going to make the sale process a lot easier. It’s a way to nurture leads and give users the impression that you took the time to get to know them as an individual. If done correctly, users will begin to build brand loyalty and be more likely to stay on your website to make a conversion because they feel like you care about their wants and needs.

Retargeting ads

The idea of re-engaging your audience after a visit to your site through RLSA or retargeted display ads will help build brand recognition, and assist immensely in bringing users back to your site. By using retargeting ads, you’re sending a subtle reminder to users about an interaction with your site earlier, the products they looked at, and in general, a signal of encouragement to visit your website again. These ads give you an opportunity revive a lead that may have otherwise been dead. After users connect with you on any platform and channel, retargeting ads are a good way to bring back the brand recognition, to ideally bring them back to your site.